Sleeping Beauty (1959 film)

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Sleeping Beauty
Directed by Clyde Geronimi (supervising)
Les Clark
Eric Larson
Wolfgang Reitherman
Produced by Walt Disney
Written by Erdman Penner (adaptation)
Joe Rinaldi
Winston Hibler
Bill Peet
Ted Sears
Ralph Wright
Milt Banta
Charles Perrault (original fairy tale)
Starring Mary Costa
Eleanor Audley
Verna Felton
Barbara Luddy
Barbara Jo Allen
Bill Shirley
Taylor Holmes
Bill Thompson
Distributed by Buena Vista Distribution
Release date(s) January 29, 1959
Running time 75 minutes
Language English
Budget $6,000,000 USD (estimated)
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Sleeping Beauty is a 1959 animated feature produced by Walt Disney and originally released to theatres on January 29, 1959, by Buena Vista Distribution. The sixteenth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon, it was the last animated feature produced by Walt Disney to be based upon a fairy tale (after his death, the studio returned to the genre with 1989's The Little Mermaid). In addition, Sleeping Beauty was the first animated feature to be shot in Super Technirama 70, one of many large-format widescreen processes. Only one more animated film, The Black Cauldron, was ever shot in Super Technirama 70.

The film was directed by Les Clark, Eric Larson, and Wolfgang Reitherman, under the supervision of Clyde Geronimi. The script was adapted from the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault by Erdman Penner, with additional story work by Joe Rinaldi, Winston Hibler, Bill Peet, Ted Sears, Ralph Wright, and Milt Banta. The film's musical score and songs, featuring the work of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, are adapted from the 1890 Sleeping Beauty ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Contents

Princess Aurora is named after the Roman goddess of the dawn "because she fills her father and mother's lives with sunshine." While still an infant, she is betrothed to the also-young Prince Phillip (sometimes misspelled Philip). At her christening, the good fairies Flora (dressed in red), Fauna (in green), and Merryweather (in blue) arrive to bless her. Flora gives her the gift of beauty, which is described in a song as "gold of sunshine in her hair" and "lips that shame the red, red rose." Fauna gives her the gift of song. At this point, Maleficent, the film's villain and Mistress of All Evil, appears on the scene. Claiming to be upset at not being invited to Aurora's christening ceremony, she curses the princess to die when she touches a spinning wheel's spindle before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday. Fortunately, Merryweather has not yet blessed Aurora, so she uses her blessing to weaken Maleficent's curse, so Aurora will not die when she touches the spinning wheel; instead, she will fall asleep until she is awakened by her true love's kiss. Aurora's father, King Stefan, orders all spinning wheels in the kingdom are to be burned, but the three fairies, watching the massive bonfire, do not think that the princess will be safe. Knowing Maleficent is extremely powerful and will stop at nothing to see her curse fulfilled, the three good fairies take Aurora to live with them in the woods, where they can keep her safe from any harm until she turns sixteen and the curse is made void. To fully protect her, they even change her name to Briar Rose.

Rose grows into a very beautiful young woman, with shining blond hair, rose-red lips, attractive eyes, and a beautiful singing voice. She is raised in a cottage in the forest by the three fairies, whom she believes are her aunts. Meanwhile, the evil creatures employed by Maleficent admit to their mistress that they have not been able to find the princess, despite looking in every cradle they could find. Maleficent realises that they have been looking for a baby for 16 years and sends her "last hope", her pet raven, to look for Aurora. On the day of her sixteenth birthday, the three fairies choose to use magic to make Rose a gown and a cake. As Flora and Merryweather fight it out to have the dress their signature color, Maleficent's raven flies over the forest and spots the magical glitter fluttering in the air. It then reports back to Maleficent who has been waiting anxiously sixteen years for news of the princess who vanished into thin air to have her revenge. While out picking berries, Rose sings to entertain her animal friends; her angelic voice gains the attention of Prince Phillip, who has grown into a handsome young man and is out riding in the woods. When they meet, they instantly fall in love. Realizing that she has to return home, Aurora flees from Phillip without ever learning his name. Despite promising to meet him again, she is unable to return, as her "aunts" choose that time to reveal the truth of her birth to her and to tell her that she is betrothed to a prince named Phillip.

They leave the woods, and Aurora makes it into the castle. Unfortunately, Maleficent uses her magic to lure Aurora away from her chambers up into the tallest tower of the castle, where a spinning wheel awaits her. Fascinated by the wheel, she touches the spindle, pricking her finger. As had been foretold by the curse, Aurora is put under a sleeping spell. The good fairies place Aurora on her bed with a red rose in her hand, and cause a deep sleep to fall over the entire kingdom until they can find a way to break the curse. They find out the answer is Phillip, but he has been captured and imprisoned by Maleficent to prevent him from kissing Aurora and waking her up. The three good fairies sneak into Maleficent's lair, The Forbidden Mountain, and aid the prince in escaping and explain to him the story of Maleficent's curse. Armed with the magical Sword of Truth and The Shield of Virtue, Phillip battles Maleficent when the sorceress turns herself into a gigantic fire-breathing dragon. The sword, blessed by the fairies' magic, is plunged into the dragon's heart, killing her. Phillip climbs to Aurora's chamber, and removes the curse with a kiss. As the film ends, the couple enters the great hall and dances together after Aurora is reunited with her parents, the prince and princess happy to each learn that their betrothed and their beloved are one and the same, while Flora and Merryweather fight it out for the color of Aurora's dress once again as the film ends.

Sleeping Beauty spent nearly the entire decade of the 1950s in production: the story work began in 1951, voices were recorded in 1952, animation production took from 1953 until 1958, and the stereophonic musical score, partially based on Tchaikovsky's ballet of the same name, was recorded in 1957. The film holds a notable position in Disney animation as the last Disney feature to use hand-inked cels. Beginning with the next feature, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Disney would move to the use of xerography to transfer animators' drawings from paper to celluloid. Its art, which Walt Disney wanted to look like a living illustration and which was inspired by medieval art, was not in the typical Disney style. Because the Disney studio had already made two features based on fairy tales, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella, Walt Disney wanted this film to stand out from its predecessors by choosing a different visual style. The movie eschewed the soft, rounded look of earlier Disney features for a more stylized one. Since Super Technirama 70 was used, it also meant the backgrounds could contain more detailed and complex artwork than ever used in an animated movie before.

Disney artist Eyvind Earle was the film's production designer, and Disney gave him a significant amount of freedom in designing the settings and selecting colors for the film. Earle also painted the majority of the backgrounds himself. The elaborate paintings usually took seven to ten days to paint; by contrast, a typical animation background took only one workday to complete. Disney's decision to give Earle so much artistic freedom was not popular among the Disney animators, who had until Sleeping Beauty exercised some influence over the style of their characters and settings.

The name of the beautiful Sleeping Beauty is "Princess Aurora" (Latin for "dawn") , in this film, as it was in the original Tchaikovsky ballet; this name occurred in Perrault's version, not as the princess's name, but as her daughter's.[1] In hiding, she is called Briar Rose, the name of the princess in the Brothers Grimm variant.[2] The prince was given the only princely name familiar to Americans in the 1950s: "Prince Phillip," named after Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The dark fairy was aptly named Maleficent (which means "Evil-doer").

Walt Disney had suggested that all three good fairies should look alike, but veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston objected, saying that three identical fairies would not be exciting. Additionally, the idea originally included seven fairies instead of three. In determining Maleficent's design, standard depictions of witches and hags were dismissed as animator Marc Davis opted for a more elegant look centered around the appearance of flames, ultimately crowning the villain with "the horns of the devil."

Several story points for this film came from discarded ideas for Disney's previous fairy tale involving a sleeping heroine: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They include Maleficent's capture of the Prince and the Prince's daring escape from her castle. Disney discarded these ideas from Snow White because his artists were not able to draw a human male believably enough at the time. Also discarded from Snow White but used in this film were the ideas of the dance with the makeshift prince, and the fantasy sequence of the prince and princess dancing in the clouds, which was also considered but dropped from Cinderella.

Before animation production began, every shot in the film was done in a live-action reference version, with live actors in costume serving as models for the animators. The role of Prince Phillip was modeled by Ed Kemmer, who had played Commander Buzz Corry on television's Space Patrol five years before Sleeping Beauty was released. For the final battle sequence, Kemmer was photographed on a wooden buck. Among the actresses who performed in reference footage for this film were Spring Byington, Frances Bavier, and Helene Stanley.

Helene Stanley was the live action reference for Princess Aurora. The only known surviving footage of Stanley as Aurora's live-action reference is a clip from the television program Disneyland, which consists of the artists sketching her dancing with the woodland animals. It was not the first or last time Stanley worked for Disney; she also provided live-action references for Cinderella and Anita from One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and she also portrayed Polly Crockett for the TV series Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. An episode of The Mickey Mouse Club television series features Stanley re-enacting scenes from the Sleeping Beauty for the Mousketeers to watch (a clip from this episode is included as a special feature on the Cinderella Platinum Edition DVD).

All the live actors' performances were either screened for the animators' reference or rotoscoped (traced from live-action to animation), as Walt Disney insisted that much of Sleeping Beauty's character animation be as close to live-action as possible.

Disney's distribution arm, Buena Vista Distribution, originally released Sleeping Beauty to theaters in both standard 35mm prints and large-format 70mm prints. The Super Technirama 70mm prints were equipped with six-track stereophonic sound; some CinemaScope-compatible 35mm Technirama prints were released in 4 channel stereo, and others had monaural soundtracks.

During its original release, Sleeping Beauty returned only half the invested sum of $6,000,000, nearly bankrupting the Disney studio. It was mainly criticized as being slowly paced and having little character development (which is a debatable point, since this was a differently formulated film than other classic Disney fare). Since then, the film has gained a following and is today hailed as one of the best animated features ever made, thanks to its stylized designs by painter Eyvind Earle who also was the art director for the movie, its lush music score and its large-format widescreen and stereophonic sound presentation.

The film was re-released theatrically in 1970, 1979 (in 70mm 6 channel stereo, as well as in 35 mm stereo and mono), and in 1986. When adjusted for ticket price inflation, the domestic total gross comes out to $478.22 million, placing it in the top 30 of adjusted films. [3]

Sleeping Beauty was released on both VHS and Laserdisc that same year in the Classics collection, becoming the first Disney Classics video to be digitally processed in Hi-Fi stereo. Then the film underwent an extensive digital restoration in 1997, and that version was released to both VHS and Laserdisc again as part of the Masterpiece collection. In 2003, the restored Sleeping Beauty was released to DVD in a 2-disc "Special Edition" which included both the original widescreen version and a pan and scan version as well.

A Platinum Edition release of Sleeping Beauty, as a 2-disc DVD/Blu-ray Disc combo set, is currently scheduled for October 7, 2008. This release will make Sleeping Beauty the first entry i nthe Platinum Edition line to be released in high definition video. The Blu-ray version will feature BD-Live, an online feature, and the extras will include a virtual castle and multi-player games.[4][5]

Aurora is one of the seven Princesses of Hearts in the popular Square Enix game Kingdom Hearts (although her appearances are brief), and Maleficent is a villain in all three Kingdom Hearts games. The good fairies appear in Kingdom Hearts II, giving Sora new clothes.

Princess Aurora, Prince Phillip, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather were featured as guests in House of Mouse, and Maleficent was one of the villains in Mickey's House of Villains.

The first all-new story featuring the characters from the movie appeared in Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams, the first volume of collection of the Disney Princesses. It was released on September 4, 2007.

Various characters also appear in the board game of the same name.

Princess Aurora and the three good fairies
Princess Aurora and the three good fairies

Characters who are unvoiced include Maleficent's raven and the lackey. The actress who voiced King Stefan's queen is unknown.

Sleeping Beauty cast member at Walt Disney World
Sleeping Beauty cast member at Walt Disney World

Sleeping Beauty was made while Walt Disney was building Disneyland (hence the four year production time). To help promote the film, Imagineers declared the castle there was Sleeping Beauty's (it was originally to be Snow White's).

Several years later an indoor walkthrough section was added to the castle, where guests could walk through dioramas of scenes from the film. It closed shortly after September 11, 2001, supposedly because the dark, unmonitored corridors were a risk. Currently, the former attraction is being used as extra space to house parts for the new fireworks show for Disneyland's 50th anniversary celebration. As a result, none of the original walkthrough remains intact.

Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant at Disneyland Paris is a variant of Sleeping Beauty Castle. The version found at Disneyland Paris is much more reminiscent of the film's artistic direction.


Hong Kong Disneyland opened in 2005, also with a Sleeping Beauty Castle, with a fairly-similar design to Disneyland's.

Princess Aurora (and, to a lesser extent, Prince Phillip, the Three Good Fairies, and Maleficent) makes regular appearances in the parks and parades.

  1. Main Title/Once Upon a Dream/Prologue
  2. Hail to the Princess Aurora
  3. The Gifts of Beauty and Song/Maleficent Appears/True Love Conquers All
  4. The Burning of the Spinning Wheels/The Fairies' Plan
  5. Maleficent's Frustration
  6. A Cottage in the Woods
  7. Do You Hear That?/I Wonder
  8. An Unusual Prince/Once Upon a Dream
  9. Magical House Cleaning/Blue or Pink
  10. A Secret Revealed
  11. Skumps (Drinking Song)/The Royal Argument
  12. Prince Phillip Arrives/How to Tell Stefan
  13. Aurora's Return/Maleficent's Evil Spell
  14. Poor Aurora/Sleeping Beauty
  15. Forbidden Mountain
  16. A Fairy Tale Come True
  17. Battle with the Forces of Evil
  18. Awakening
  19. Finale

On Classic Disney: 60 Years of Musical Magic, this includes Once Upon a Dream on the green disc and I Wonder on the purple disc. And on Disney's Greatest Hits, this also includes Once Upon a Dream on the blue disc.

  • In the final sequence, Aurora and Phillip are shown dancing a waltz, which didn't exist in the Middle Ages. (The Tchaikovsky ballet, like other works of the period, also has this discrepancy.)
  • During the scene where Maleficent taunts Phillip, she mentions that he will have to wait one hundred years. This is a nod to the original fairy tale in which 100 years pass. In the actual film, Aurora likely slept for only a few hours (a difference of five orders of magnitude).
  • Prince Phillip's horse is named Samson, perhaps after the Biblical hero.
  • Prince Phillip is the first Disney prince to have a name. Snow White's princes went nameless, and Cinderella's is merely referred to as "Prince Charming".
  • For the future Kingdom Hearts game, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, it shows Terra fighting long thorns heading for a castle, which concludes that the setting of this movie will be featured in the game. There is also a cutscene where Terra is talking to Maleficent.
  • Currently, for the Disney Princesses line, Disney portrays Aurora's gown as pink even though the dress is blue for majority of the film (including the most crucial scenes).

  1. ^ Heidi Anne Heiner, "The Annotated Sleeping Beauty"
  2. ^ Jacob and Wilheim Grimm, Grimm's Fairy Tales, "Briar Rose"
  3. ^ http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
  4. ^ http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=407 Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray release
  5. ^ http://disney.go.com/disneyvideos/animatedfilms/junglebook/ Jungle Book, the first platinum title for DVD, not sleeping beauty

v • d • e
Disney theatrical animated features
Official canon

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) • Pinocchio (1940) • Fantasia (1940) • Dumbo (1941) • Bambi (1942) • Saludos Amigos (1942) • The Three Caballeros (1944) • Make Mine Music (1946) • Fun and Fancy Free (1947) • Melody Time (1948) • The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) • Cinderella (1950) • Alice in Wonderland (1951) • Peter Pan (1953) • Lady and the Tramp (1955) • Sleeping Beauty (1959) • One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) • The Sword in the Stone (1963) • The Jungle Book (1967) • The Aristocats (1970) • Robin Hood (1973) • The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) • The Rescuers (1977) • The Fox and the Hound (1981) • The Black Cauldron (1985) • The Great Mouse Detective (1986) • Oliver & Company (1988) • The Little Mermaid (1989) • The Rescuers Down Under (1990) • Beauty and the Beast (1991) • Aladdin (1992) • The Lion King (1994) • Pocahontas (1995) • The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) • Hercules (1997) • Mulan (1998) • Tarzan (1999) • Fantasia 2000 (1999) • The Emperor's New Groove (2000) • Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) • Lilo & Stitch (2002) • Treasure Planet (2002) • Brother Bear (2003) • Home on the Range (2004) • Chicken Little (2005) • Meet the Robinsons (2007) • Bolt (2008) • The Princess and the Frog (2009) • Rapunzel (2010)
Live-action films
with animation
DisneyToon features
Other
See also
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_%281959_film%29"
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